Tag Archives: iPhone 5


Of Maps and Men: is Apple relying on us to fix the iPhone 5?

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Ville Miettinen

… have been wondering if Apple can continue to delight the world with groundbreaking products. The iPhone 5 was a crucial test for the new leaders of the world’s most valuable company. So far the results have been less than brilliant.

Is Apple as lost as we are?

The main criticism levelled at the new phone is that the changes are only incremental. Bigger, lighter, faster, but where’s the wow-factor?

Just as damning, perhaps, is the substitution of one of the most useful apps – …

Tags: apple crowdsourcing google Google Map IOS iPhone iPhone 5 microtask OpenStreetMap waze

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Michael S Hart: a man of many words

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

… As people everywhere continue to mourn the loss of Steve Jobs (mainly by buying yet another iPhone ), spare a thought for another recently departed tech visionary: Michael S Hart.

Like Jobs, Hart was a pioneer amongst geeks. Way back in 1971 (when “the Internet” had a grand total of 100 users) Hart founded Project Gutenberg, a non-profit enterprise to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks”. As a commenter on our recent Google Ngrams blog pointed out, not …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing E-book google Google Books Hart iPhone Michael Hart microwork Project Gutenberg Steve Jobs

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VizWiz: what the crowd sees is what you get

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Ville Miettinen

For most people the phrase “I just couldn’t live without my iPhone/ Android/ Blackberry” is just a figure of speech. We might love (or in the case of Apple fanboys, worship) our gadgets but the majority of us would probably still function without 24-hour access to touch-screens, wifi, and Plants vs. Zombies. For many disabled people however, access to technology can be literally life-changing.

Over the past couple of decades there’s been a quiet …

Tags: Android apple crowd crowdsourcing Disability distributed work iPhone microtask microwork research Speech recognition United States

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Microtask: we love the forms you hate

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… any long term commitment – we just want to digitize your data (but in a good way, not a creepy-iPhone-tracking way). Like we did with Digitalkoot, we’ve built a platform using crowdsourcing to get repetitive and dull work done better and faster. Why not form your own opinion and give it a try?

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing digitizing Filing cabinet human iPad iPhone Mars Microsoft Excel microtask forms microwork Osama Bin Laden paper forms Paperless office structured data

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Crowdsourcing vs privacy: do we know too much?

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

… shots like “Angelina Jolie buys milk” and “Justin Bieber checks his watch”). Now, a new iPhone app for gossip lovers promises to make celebrities’ lives even more over-exposed. Says the press release: “All you have to do is take a picture of a celebrity on your phone using this app and your image will be instantly submitted from anywhere around the globe to Big Pictures so that you can make LOADS of INSTANT CASH!”. If I was a famous soccer player, I’d start worrying about …

Tags: crowd crowdsourcing Facebook Facebook features foursquare iPhone Justin Bieber Louis Kronenberger microtask microwork Privacy san francisco

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